Posts tagged “video”

I shared this song with a friend on facebook a while back, and introduced the post with the question in the title. He told me: “Not sure if anyone ever said that.” Maybe nobody said it out loud, but I still feel like some people have harboured suspiciouns in this regard. Well, here is the proof that will have you discard your doubts if you ever had any; Break my Stride by Mathew Wilder from 1983. Take note of the crazy outfits, the interesting dance moves and Mathew Wilder’s proto-hipster moustache!

After briefly straying into the domain of protests and revolution, it’s time to get back on track with some funky R&B from the height of the carnivalistic madness of the 1980s. Behind this great track are the Bar Kays, a resilient band with a stormy history. They started out in 1966 as a backing band for Stax Records, and were chosen to support Otis Redding in 1967. Tragically, four of the founding members died in the same plane crash that also ended Otis Redding’s career much too early. The two surviving members of the Bar Kays however managed to re-establish the band – an admirable accomplishment. They went on to become a successful funk band in the seventies, and kept up the success with a more commercial sound as they entered the eighties.

Since Black Metal originated in Scandinavia in the early nineties, the scandal ridden metal sub genre has become a prime cultural export of Norway. The audience stretches from Buenos Aires via Teheran to Tokyo, and the biggest names still draw massive audiences on their world tours. At this point however I wish to wipe the dust of a Norwegian rock band at the total opposite end of the scale; Hair Rockers TNT. They never reached as big an audience as their Swedish counterpart Europe, but their tunes are equally catchy and the band bangs out a constant virtuosic overload. With vocalist Tony Harnell covering four octaves, and Guitarist Ronny Le Tekro possessing some wild guitar skills, they did however become very big in Scandinavia and in Japan (of course).

Today’s sleek and soulless computer animations have a long and quirky history behind them. Steve Rutt and Bill Etra were two of the pioneers of computer animation, and revolutionized the field with their video synthesizer from 1972. In the somewhat surrealistic video below, Bill Etra himself explains some of the features of their synthesizer: